Kashmir attack and India-Pakistan crisis, 2025: analysis
A terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir on 22 April 2025 killed 26 people, and precipitated a crisis in India-Pakistan relations not seen since 2019. Here are some pieces of analysis by InSAAN members to explain aspects of the current crisis or set out important context.
InSAAN members are actively engaging with the media to share their expertise on the current India-Pakistan crisis.
Nitasha Kaul argues that the Modi government's push for tourism in Kashmir as a political solution, without security guarantees, in a region of longstanding conflict, does not serve Indian interests. India needs a rational and strategic response to address security and call for accountability; it does not need increased Hindu-Muslim hate, Hindutva scapegoating of all Kashmiris, and another India-Pakistan conflict cycle with long term effect. You can find her piece in The Conversation UK, dated 24 April 2025.
Dan Haines and Kate Sullivan de Estrada argue that India's suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan has woven the historic treaty and the wider bilateral conflict together for the first time, in an article for The Conversation UK, published on 15 April 2025.
Context matters: you can explore more writings from our members on India, Pakistan, Kashmir and the region’s water and nuclear politics.
Nitasha Kaul has been writing creatively and through her extensive scholarship on Kashmir for a quarter of a century. Her first novel Residue was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2009.
Rohan Mukherjee offers an in-depth backgrounder on India-Pakistan relations, in the 2019 Sage Handbook of Asian Foreign Policy, examining the historical roots of the India–Pakistan rivalry and the contemporary dynamics of the relationship, and assessing the future trajectory of the relationship. He asks what conditions would need to hold in order for peace to break out between India and Pakistan?
Rohan also examined how the 2019 Balakot crisis represented a change in the degree to which India was willing to escalate a crisis with Pakistan, if not a deeper shift in the South Asian strategic environment in War on the Rocks, on 2 October 2019.
In a 2020 chapter, Kate Sullivan de Estrada examined how India’s exceptional relationship with the global nuclear non-proliferation regime has led to its framing as an outsider, a challenger and even a threat to the regime, but also how India has worked hard to secure status, institutional recognition and material advantages. This is all relevant to India's nuclear crisis behaviour.
Kate also asked why democracy, economic interdependence, and institutions are yet to deliver significant levels of peaceful cooperation in South Asia, in a 2020 chapter with Rajesh Basrur in the The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations.
Before the Indus Waters Treaty went into abeyance, Dan Haines argued in a two-page policy brief that it should not be renegotiated. His book Rivers Divided (2017, published in India as Indus Divided), explained the history of the treaty negotiations and their aftermath from the 1940s-1960s. He argued that water-sharing remained implicitly political throughout ‘technical’ negotiations. The current linking of the treaty back to international conflict thoroughly re-politicises water.